trying to see through the gap between the billboards

March 07, 2007

Art, existentialism and tinnitus

I generally go on [and on] here about the struggle to create art. But once a painting has been created here in the studio its life is mostly wretched, languishing as it does in The Racks... “No! No! Not – the Racks!” they cry, as I cart them off to ignominy.

The racks, in case you haven’t been paying attention, are at best a creative limbo where paintings go to rest for a while, away from my critical gaze. At worst they are merely a holding pen prior to The Great White Brush of Repentance.

[Excuse the declamatory nature of this post, but I’ve recently had my toes massaged, with a view to reducing the tinnitus in my left ear. Victoria, for it was she, recommended I drink more water and less coffee, so it is in a somewhat hydrated, yet holistically euphoric, state that I write this.]

When does it become Art then? Some would say when I put down my brushes, others [god bless ‘em] when I pick up my brushes. For me it is when it is chosen. When someone buys a painting it begins its existence. Until that point It is just something I have done. Okay, as Bruce Nauman says if I consider myself an artist then everything I do is art [and Piero Manzoni took this to its ultimate extreme in 1961, see below] but it doesn’t feel like that.

There is no point that I am trying to reach, there is not a prescribed path I’m travelling along which has its outcome in Art. Before I make the marks nothing exists. But the “finished” picture has, and indeed should have, an air of always having had existed. Another tricky problem that.

As Mark Ravenhill said yesterday:

“It's even worse when the play is published. Whether a reader likes the play or not, it will look to them like an authoritative stream of text, a definitive statement. What I see is great black holes of missed opportunities. This is not false modesty. This is quite honestly what it feels like to open a book with my name on the cover.
I'm amazed that academics haven't grasped this. Whenever an academic talks to me about my work, there's still an assumption that here is a definitive, confident text that is at my bidding. I don't disillusion them. It's much more comfortable to talk about my plays in that way than as the poor undernourished phantoms they look like to me.” Mark Ravenhill, the Guardian.